Our lives are represented by the experiences we have, the accomplishments we achieve, and the memories we make. Every moment you have is different from another, but the one common thing between all the best memories is that they usually involve loved ones and people who are close to us.
Good memories make us feel great, and there are days when you will want to relive them. To keep good memories alive, you can’t just depend on your memory. Your memory doesn’t store everything, so you can’t possibly expect to remember the happy occasions fully. You see, events are made up of many details and your mind will only store what it considers important. So how do you keep the memories alive? Everyone has some tricks to rekindle the nice feelings they get from a good memory. Here are a few ideas you can use.
Visit Real Simple for more tips, and read on for a few ideas you can use.
Create a Website
Before websites, most people only had the option of saving their photos in photo albums. They’d collect photos from a specific time or event in their life into an album and name those albums; a wedding, first baby, and other milestone events.
Having a website operates on a much larger scale and is a more up-to-date way of saving your memories. You can upload anything onto your site, from special songs and video recordings to videos and pictures. A website allows you to get creative and use templates that represent the feel you want to give to the content you upload. It offers an array of colors, visuals, layouts, and fonts. When all put together, these elements create a story, and as they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” What goes online stays online, so what you create can be shared with anyone you want to share those memories with.
Go Digital
We live in a digital world. The changes that have happened in the last decade within the tech world are substantial, with so many digital gadgets to store our music, photos, books, you name it. Those old enough to remember will recall that, back in the day, our favorite songs were either on tapes or LP records, not to mention VHS tape collections.
If you have saved those tapes or VHS recordings in a drawer somewhere in your home, it’s time to dig them out and digitize them. Depending on where you live, you can find professionals to do the job for you. Dust and mold can destroy your old tapes, thus destroying your memories, which you’ll never get back. That’s why the folks over at https://tapestodigital.co.uk/ recommend transferring old tapes into other digital formats; 8mm film, DVCam, MiniDV, and Betamax can be converted to DVD and Betacam. After digitizing old tapes, you can upload them to the cloud and view or share them with others at any time and from any place. Don’t miss your chance to save your memories before they’re gone for good.
Keep a Journal
For those who love to write, a good old-fashioned journal or diary may be a great way to document memories. It’s too easy to forget the details of a special day in your life and writing down the events of that day will bring the smallest details of that day to life when revisiting it later on. It’s particularly nice to remember how good you felt at a certain stage in your life.
You can write down dialogues and conversations you had with others and how they made you feel. Words are always a very powerful expression tool and they can help you remember exactly how certain events transpired. A journal would be the least expensive way to save memories. When you think about it, much of what we know about history is because someone decided to keep a journal. Our ancestors left words and pictures behind that express their lives, which is why we have so much knowledge of our origin, culture, and other less familiar cultures around the world. Your journal can be a family heirloom, passed down from generation to generation, if you wish.
Tell Stories
If writing isn’t your thing, you can try talking. Most people love talking, especially about themselves. There have to be at least a couple of stories in your life that you would like to tell and, the older you get, the more stories you will have to tell. Maybe you’d like to share a story with your kids or grandkids. An interesting story will pique their interest and they’ll likely remember how and when you shared that story with them.
So instead of a traditional bedtime story for young kids, why not share an experience in your life? You will be the main character of the story and it’s a creative way to share something interesting with your loved ones.
Keep Memory Boxes
There’s a ton of things that have happened and will happen in your lifetime. You’ll receive letters, flowers, gifts and more. You’d have to be pretty non-sentimental to just toss those things into a bin. For sentimental people, you’ll want to preserve them. You can do so by keeping what you want in memory boxes. Written letters, postcards, or old photos wear out over the years if not protected. You can’t just leave them lying around in open spaces where dust can get to them, fading the pictures or writings.
A few decorative boxes will preserve the items most precious to you. Keep them somewhere that isn’t in the way but is also easy to access so that anytime you feel the need to revisit your memories, you can easily do so.
These are a few things you can do to preserve some of the most precious things you own; your memories. Whether you want to keep them to yourself or share them with others, the important thing is to protect the things that carry your memories from loss or damage. Digitizing what you can and using cloud-based storage and file-sharing services are perhaps the most reliable forms of protection, allowing you to preserve your memories and share them with your loved ones to keep them alive forever.
